8/11/2003 @ 12:00AM

Is Yale a Waste of Money?

Wouldn’t it be neat if, instead of a diploma costing $160,000, you could buy a $16,000 certificate saying you got in?

Someday the university education system will simply price itself out of business and save us all a lot of grief. In the meantime we have these bills to pay, $300 billion a year. If tuition payments loom large in your family’s budget, study the financing techniques outlined by Ira Carnahan and Ashlea Ebeling, beginning on page 98. As for the large part of the burden borne, directly or indirectly, by government, the question to ask is: Are we getting our money’s worth?

A (weak) case can be made that the government should subsidize a course in how to drill teeth, because it will get the money back from income taxes on the dentist. Harder to justify is any public entanglement in a course like Video Games as Gendered Spaces, an item in the current University of Utah catalog.

The people in the education business will tell you that college grads have much higher incomes than nongrads. True, but if you have ever taken a course on logical fallacies, you will see right through this argument. Correlation is not cause and effect. As Dan Seligman noted in this magazine a while back, citing research by economist Alan Krueger and others, the higher income of people who attend elite universities is due more to their innate abilities than to the courses they take. In other words, Bill Gates lost nothing by dropping out of college and joining the work force.

Maybe a B.A. is worth real money because it signals to employers that the job candidate is capable. If so, there ought to be some way to send this signal without blowing $160,000 on four years of liberal arts courses. Think of all the savings to society if Yale were willing to sell, for a mere $16,000, a certificate saying that such-and-such an applicant was duly admitted but chose not to attend.

Yale won’t do it? Okay, some entrepreneur could step in with a company called Virtual Sheepskin. Send off your SAT scores and an essay to Virtual, and get a piece of paper saying you are Ivy League material. Take a job writing Xbox software at Microsoft. Four years later you have a terrific résumé.

For some careers there is no substitute for classroom lectures. If you want to become a professor of gender studies, this is the way to go. For others, the best training comes on the job. Bricklaying and journalism are in this category. So is software.